In the field of mechanical processing and similar, in particular as regards workshop fixtures, the need is known to be able to lock the piece to be processed with respect to the machine with which the mechanical piece is to be processed in a manner which is safe, repeatable and effective.
This locking occurs, for example, by means of perforated L-shaped elements, which are fixed to the mechanical piece to be processed, by way of holes that are already present thereon, and to a perforated plate, which acts as a resting surface for processing and is fixed to the machine used for the processing.
As an alternative, vises are also known which can be fixed to the perforated plate and are capable of clamping the piece to be processed so as to keep it motionless during processing.
These known types of fixture are not free from drawbacks, which include the fact that since their dimensions and connection systems are standardized, they are scarcely flexible fixing systems, which therefore are not always suitable for locking particular mechanical pieces that do not have holes and geometries that are compatible with such fixtures.
If the mechanical piece to be processed in fact has particularly small geometry and/or dimensions, these known types of fixture cannot always be used, forcing the operator to provide custom fixtures capable of obviating the limitations of fixtures of the standardized type.
Even these custom fixtures of the known type are not free from drawbacks, which include the fact that if they are used to process small batches of pieces, the number of processed pieces is not such as to justify the production costs of such fixture. Such custom fixtures of the known type, in order to be economically convenient, in fact require large production batches.
Another drawback of known types of fixture, both standardized and custom, resides in that they do not allow correct fixing of the piece to be processed. The simple bolting of the fixture to the piece and/or to the perforated plate very often is in fact insufficient to give the correct structural rigidity to the assembly formed by the piece, the fixture and the perforated plate, causing the piece to vibrate during processing and/or to move, reducing considerably the degree of precision of the processing.
A further drawback of known types of fixture is that their use requires a large number of bolting operations, which inevitably lead to an increase in the downtimes linked to machine stops, with consequent reductions in productivity.